Karachi Novel at Oct. 17 Books & Brunch

The novel is about a Pakistani family that began with an eloping couple – a Jewish woman with a Muslim man, who later also married the Muslim woman to whom his family had engaged him. The educated children of this family live upper middle class lives, mostly in New York, but also in Karachi.

Naqvi describes three cultures: Karachi in the 1950s and now as well as present-day New York. Naqvi, a senior social protection specialist for the World Bank whose debut novels were published by Oxford University Press, divides her time between Washington, D.C., and World Bank project work in Bosnia. She has donated copies of the book to the NPC; to obtain a copy email Lorna2@verizon.net.

At teh Sept. 26 meeting of Books & Brunch, the discussion of Timothy Egan’s "The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl" was comobined with live oral history. Books & Brunch member Stacy Hoffhaus’s 91-year-old aunt, Maxine Slick, who grew up on a farm in central Kansas, helped bring the “Dirty Thirties” alive during a brief but informative telephone Q&A session with meeting attendees. Stacy also shared several old family photos with the group, including one showing pre–Dust Bowl wheat harvesting.